Yarrah Paté: Beef and Chicken review

All four pâtés sit together in our Average band, and the reading needs explaining. The two whose ingredient lists are published lean on meat and animal derivatives with only part of the animal content named, which our scoring marks down. The other two publish no list at all, so they are read from their analysis panels, where protein converts high and carbohydrate barely registers. A silent label is not the same as a better recipe, and the fair reading is that all four are built to the same house pattern. Most wet food we look at reaches our Excellent band, so these four sit behind the middle of the shelf.

Ingredients, as declared: Niet gevoerd in dit land

Two of the four labels are published, and both are built the same way. The 400g Chicken can opens with 52% meat and animal derivatives, chicken named at 19% inside that block. After it come organic peas, plant derivatives, minerals and a little dried seaweed and spirulina at 0.6% and 0.1%. The Chicken and Turkey pâté opens wider at 55% and then names all of it: 30% chicken, 15% beef and 10% turkey.

The beef inside that Chicken and Turkey recipe is the detail to carry away. In every other respect it is the fullest declaration in the range, which makes it all the odder that an animal making up a substantial share of the tin never appears in the name. A dog avoiding beef would be caught out by it.

For the Beef and Chicken pâté and the 150g Chicken tray there is no recipe list to work from, and it would be wrong to read anything flattering into that silence. What they do publish is the analysis, and it is a lean one. Protein converts to 51.4% and 47.4% of dry matter, fat to 31.4% and 36.8%, and carbohydrate to 3.5% and 0.5%. Those are the panels of recipes with almost no starch in them.

All four carry plenty of moisture, 81.0% on three of them and 82.5% on the Beef and Chicken. That is what gives a pâté its texture, and it is simply what wet food is.

The dried seaweed and spirulina on the Chicken can, and the dried aloe vera at 1.5% on the Chicken and Turkey, are the only botanical flourishes here. Both sit at levels that season and mineralise, nothing more. Seaweed is a genuine source of iodine, which is worth knowing given how the added panel is printed.

Which brings us to that panel. Yarrah publishes its vitamin and trace element values as bare numbers, with no unit given anywhere on the page. The range of additives is reasonable, taking in B vitamins, vitamin D3, vitamin E, biotin, iodine, manganese and copper on the trays, and they are all genuinely declared. There is simply no way to read a dose from the page as it stands.

Yarrah publishes no ingredient list for this one, so the panel is all there is to go on. Protein converts to 51.4% of dry matter, the highest of the four. Moisture is the highest too at 82.5%, and carbohydrate comes to almost nothing at 3.5%. It is also the only one Yarrah lists for puppies, on top of adults and seniors. A mixed age household can feed one tray to everybody.

The Beef and Chicken, the Chicken and Turkey and the 150g Chicken pâtés are £10.67 a kilo in packs of 12 × 150g trays. The Chicken can is £8.00 a kilo in a 400g size.

Take about 840 kcal a day as the working figure for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). At that level the Beef and Chicken comes to £10.42 a day, the Chicken and Turkey £9.89, the 150g Chicken tray £9.04 and the 400g Chicken can £7.64. In grams that runs from about 848 to 977 a day depending on which one you pick.